


Kaleidoscope People

by imaginationtherapy



Series: The Kaleidoscope Project [19]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Bipolar Disorder, Depression, Mania, Mental Illness, Prose Poem, bipolar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 16:04:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17124455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imaginationtherapy/pseuds/imaginationtherapy
Summary: We don't see the world the way you do. Our colors are brighter, our emotions are stronger, and our struggles are different.





	Kaleidoscope People

**Author's Note:**

> This prose contains a rather detailed (and perhaps romanticized, but that's how I write) portrayal of bipolar symptoms such as mania and depression.

Our moods are like colors, shapes shifting, creating patterns—all of them beautiful if you have eyes to see.

I think the first step to healing is to learn to love this aspect of me I’ve always hated. Rather than controlling and shoving and pretending it’s not true, learning to love and nurture and manage—the sensitivity followed by the insensitivity; the anger, sadness, euphoria. It’s beautiful and different. I am not like others. I am different. I see a different world. I face a unique challenges: the challenges of living in a kaleidoscope.

 

Sadness falls in shades of blue. Deep indigoes so dark you can barely see the patterns. Washed out cornflowers and periwinkle that drown my soul in numb pastels and blurred patterns. Neon electric blue hurts the eyes, as sadness washes over the shapes but the patterns change so quickly that my tired eyes can’t focus.

The green patterns are the strangest. They are calm, neither too bright nor too dark. They are not pale nor fast nor slow. Gentle. My eyes—so used to the intensity of the glitter or the blues—are uncertain of these calm, mild colors. Is this what you see always, you who live without the ‘scope?

Euphoria crashes in with an explosion of shimmering glitter. The patterns change quickly, beautiful with a painful intensity. Excitement in gold glitter. Purple, green, red and silver glitter—a cacophony of colors and patterns. It is beautiful, exhausting, exhilarating. My favorite.

From in here, the world is intense, filtered through the noise of my colored moods. It’s hard to determine what the world looks like to you. Hard to determine what you expect of me. Hard to be that despite the shifting shapes and changing colors. Hard to see what I look like to you. It’s getting hard to pretend I’m not living in a beautiful hell.


End file.
